When the governor, La Barre, visited Montreal, he found there some two hundred reprobates gambling, drinking, and stealing. If hard pressed by justice, they had only to cross the river and place themselves beyond the seigniorial jurisdiction. The military settlements of the Richelieu * Dollier de Casson, Histoire de Montréal, 1671, 72 were in a condition somewhat similar, and La Barre complains of a prevailing spirit of disobedience and lawlessness. * The most orderly and thrifty part of Canada appears to have been at this time the _cote_ of Beaupré, belonging to the seminary of Quebec. Here the settlers had religious instruction from their curés, and industrial instruction also if they wanted it. Domestic spinning and weaving were practised at Beaupré sooner than in any other part of the colony. When it is remembered that a population which in La Barre’s time did not exceed ten thousand, and which forty years later did not much exceed twice that number, was scattered along both sides of a great river for three hundred miles or more; that a large part of this population was in isolated groups of two, three, five, ten, or twenty houses at the edge of a savage wilderness; that between them there was little communication except by canoes; that the settlers were disbanded soldiers, or others whose fives had been equally adverse to habits of reflection or self-control; that they rarely saw a priest, and that a government omnipotent in name had not arms long enough to reach them,--we may listen without surprise to the lamentations of order-loving officials over the unruly condition of a great part of the colony. One accuses the seigniors, who, he says, being often of low extraction, cannot keep their vassals in order. ** Another dwells sorrowfully on the “terrible dispersion” of * La Barre au Ministre, 4 Nov., 1683. ** Catalogne, Mémoire addressé au Ministre, 1712 the settlements where the inhabitants "live in a savage independence.” But it is better that each should speak for himself, and among the rest let us hear the pious Denonville.